JURORS cleared a man of murdering his father yesterday because they believed that he had been sleepwalking when the attack took place.

Jules Lowe, 32, who runs a motorcycle shop, did not deny that he punched, kicked and stamped on his 83-year-old father, Edward, leaving him with 90 injuries. But he insisted that he had been sleepwalking throughout the savage and prolonged attack, after a lengthy drinking session at the family home in Walkden, Greater Manchester.

The claim of “automatism”, which effectively means that he was unaware of his own actions, was dismissed by the prosecution as “far-fetched in the extreme”, but at the end of a week-long trial the jury at Manchester Crown Court found Mr Lowe not guilty of murder for reason of insanity. Mr Justice Henriques told the court that the verdict did not mean that Mr Lowe was insane in the normal meaning of the word, only that he was subject to automatism.

Mr Lowe, who has a history of sleepwalking, was detained under a hospital order. The judge remanded him in custody until a suitable hospital place can be found.

The jury had been told that the defence of automatism rarely arose in Britain and that it had once been described to the Court of Appeal as a “quagmire of law, seldom entered nowadays save for those in desperate need of a defence”.

The attack took place after father and son had attended the death of a family friend. Mr Lowe had stayed to keep his father company and both had drunk gin and whisky on their return home. In the early hours, neighbours heard the sounds of what they later realised was a violent struggle. The dead man’s fully clothed body was discovered the following morning lifeless on the driveway. Mr Lowe, smelling strongly of alcohol, emerged naked saying: “Oh my God, Dad . . .”

There were signs of a violent and bloody struggle all over the house.

Richard Marks, QC, for the prosecution, told the court that a forensic science examination revealed that the son had inflicted his father’s injuries during a sustained and savage beating.

Mr Marks questioned whether it was realistically conceiv- able given the extreme violence used to batter the victim to death, the noise, the broken furniture and the fact that Mr Lowe had suffered injuries to the head, that he had no memory of these events. “Is it really conceivable that that could be the case for the entirety of the incident?” he asked.

Friends and relatives told the court of witnessing past episodes of Mr Lowe’s sleepwalking. There was no evidence that he had been aggressive or violent in the past. He was subjected to tests of his sleeping patterns at Broadmoor Hospital while both sober and drunk. They were said to be the most detailed in British legal history.

Experts concluded there was a “theoretical possibility” that the killing could have taken place while he was sleepwalking, and the jury decided that Mr Lowe had not been acting voluntarily.

The judge decided to make an immediate hospital order because of a number of incidents since the attack. Mr Lowe had lain down in front of traffic and assaulted a police officer, and was arrested for being drunk and disorderly while at a “murder mystery” weekend at a hotel a year after the the killing.

Legal experts said that Mr Lowe would be assessed by doctors and then be released on licence, probably within months.

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